Running Ruby 1.9.1 with RVM on Ubuntu karmic

It’s finally time to try out things with Ruby 1.9 – people start complaining that my libs don’t run with 1.9. Sorry for that. I’m still sticking to “Never touch a running system!”, so why should I use Ruby 1.9 when 1.8 works great? RVM First I discovered rvm which is a great tool for…

Advertisement

Skype complains “can’t write to file” when receiving upload

When a friend tried to upload some files via Skype to my PC it kept failing, Skype 2.1.0.47 for Ubuntu complained “can’t write to file” as soon as I accepted the upload. Here’s the solution: First, I created a world-writable directory mkdir /home/nick/skype-uploads chmod 777 /home/nick/skype-uploads I opened the File Transfer dialog, clicked the sprocked…

OpenOffice Impress doesn’t show videos on Ubuntu

After copying a presentation from my laptop to my desktop box (which’s running OpenOffice.org 3.1.1) the embedded AVI videos didn’t show up anymore. The error message: “The format of the selected file is not supported.” It turned out that the JRE was missing gstreamer. The solution sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Perl CGI Scripts are cached after switching to mod_perl

I recently had to port a very old perl project to a new server, which is running mod_perl- that made me some headache as I didn’t know anything about that environment. Pages with dynamic form input from CGI::param suddenly seemed to be “cached”, the script did process old variables and emitted wrong output. After diggin’…

Painless text-editing with Scribes 0.4 on Ubuntu

Colleagues keep laughing at me. It seems that I missed the point in a programmer’s life where he faces a shimmering light at the end of the dark terminal tunnel, where he suddently gets enlightened… and switches to eclipse or Textmate. Being an IDE-reject I’m used to work with bare-bones text editors, which support syntax-coloring,…

Running Xubuntu/intrepid on my IBM X31 laptop

After more than a year of marriage my X31 laptop and gutsy had to break up again. I had to upgrade my linux distribution due to some very old, outdated packages. As usual: problems after upgrading. Did I notice that I really hate to upgrade things? Well, here are some directions which should ease your…

Receiving Pingbacks on Rails sites

If you’ve never heard of pingbacks before, you’re out. Go home. Ok, pingbacks are this mysterical feature when you write on your blog A and refer to some article on blog B. After you publish your article on blog A, something happens behind the curtain. Suddenly there’s a new comment on the blog B article…

Git Cheatsheet

Branching If you’re planning to change huge parts of your code at once introduce a complex new feature or another API switch easily between different – simultaneously running – development processes of your project (actually, that’s called a branch) you’re better off creating a new branch. As soon as you switch to this branch, the…